It may be offensive to review how China lags far behind and yet is so eager to imitate Japan at a time when anti-Japanese sentiments have swept China, but a video that compares scenes of the Japanese anime “Hikarian: Great Railroad Protector” with a Chinese cartoon called “高铁侠”, which literally means ‘High-speed Train Hero’, can surely make most viewers laugh and may help diffuse the tension.

Any one that see clips of the two anime put side by side may agree that the two look strikingly similar, and even the plot and the characters are exactly the same, except that the Chinese knockoff, produced in 2010, is so much coarser than the Japanese original released in 1996.

This is another blatant copy of foreign works on screen. In January, 2010, Ministry of Tofu broke to the English-speaking world the news of state broadcaster China Central Television passing off scenes from Tom Cruise’s Top Gun in its coverage of a military drill.

A former employee of Feifan, the Chinese animation company that stole the idea from Hikarian, ranted about the absurd plagiarism in his blog. According to him, government subsidies are the main driver of the catch-as-catch-can animation industry that often produces unoriginal and unappealing works.

“In China, an animation production company with an annual output of 2,000 minutes (of works) can receive a subsidy of 1,000 yuan (US$150) per minute. The bigger the annual output, the higher per-minute subsidy you receive,” he wrote in the post.

“In 2011, Feifan produced 10,000 minutes of animated works,” he went on with his tirade, “Anyone that has worked in the industry knows how to make sense of it. An annual output of more than 10,000 minutes means churning out 40 episodes of 20-minute-long anime series every month. To put that into perspective, if Feifan were a Japanese company, it could undertake all new episodes in the entire country… with no pressure.